LHC Experiment Sets Record For The Hottest Substance Ever Created!

The sky is no longer the limit — the limit lies deep within sub-atomic particles. After the glory of the Higgs discovery, the LHC has now set a record for obtaining the hottest temperature mankind has ever seen. The trick — make a hot enough quark-gluon plasma.

The ALICE detector

At the center of this achievement lies the less talked about detector ALICE (short for A Large Ion Collider Experiment). We get to hear about the CMS and ATLAS detectors, since these are dedicated to the Higgs boson search and its subsequent measurement. The ALICE detector is a heavy-ion detector. Heavy ions, i.e. ions with very high atomic numbers and weights, like Gold and Lead, are collided at high energies. The end products are then analysed.

What the hell is QGP?

The generic end product is quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a soup of quarks, which are building blocks of protons and neutrons, and the so-called gluon particles. This is regarded as another form of matter and this was indeed the state of the Universe just moments after the Big Bang! In QGP, matter behaves like a perfect fluid, with no drag or friction.

Numbers, just for the record

Now, for the record you need numbers. The earlier record was set again by a QGP factory called the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the temperature they attained was a whopping 4-trillion degrees!! That’s a 4 followed by 12 zeroes!

ALICE isn’t quite sure of its figures yet, but the energy to temperature conversion should indicate temperature of close to 5.5 trillion degrees! But the ALICE collaboration wants a few days in order figure out the actual numbers.

The ALICE experiment is colliding beams of lead ions, but the collision between unlike heavy ions is a likely possibility for the future. That will be important to know the dependence of the parameters of the resulting fireball on the geometry of the colliding particles.

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Debjyoti Bardhan

Is a science geek, currently pursuing some sort of a degree (called a PhD) in Physics at TIFR, Mumbai. An enthusiastic but useless amateur photographer, his most favourite activity is simply lazing around. He is interested in all things interesting and scientific. View all posts by Debjyoti Bardhan